Slovak People's Party

The Slovak People's Party (SLS) was a fascist political party in Slovakia that existed from 1913 to 1945. The party was founded while Slovakia was still a part of Austria-Hungary, and it fought for democracy, Slovak national freedom, and against liberalism, and it demanded Slovak autonomy after the foundation of Czechoslovakia in the Interwar period. During the Interwar period, the SLS was a conservative party that had strong Catholic and nationalist orientation, and it supported corporatism and clericalism. In the second half of the 1930s, with the rise of fascism across Europe, the SLS took a radical turn to become a far-right fascist party with both pro-Nazi and conservative wings, and the party adopted a totalitarian vision of Slovakia. In 1939, Adolf Hitler created the Slovak Republic as a puppet state of Nazi Germany following his occupation of Czechoslovakia and its incorporation into the German Reich, and the Slovak People's Party was given power. From 1940 to 1942, the pro-Nazi wing governed Slovak policy, with Jozef Tiso leading the newly-independent republic into World War II as a German client state and an Axis Powers member. Slovakia contributed troops to the invasion of Poland in 1939 and Operation Barbarossa in 1941, but its contributions to the war were limited by the small size of the country's army and internal squabbling. By 1942, the conservative wing of the party had gained power over the fascist wing, and the Nazis ignored its seizure of power - the conservative wing was more adept at running the country and having the support of the people. In 1944, the party was briefly overthrown in the Slovak National Uprising, and it never fully regained power, even after the Germans violently crushed the uprising later that year. Many of the party's members were persecuted during the communist regime that took power after the war's end in 1945, and the party was banned.